A/N: I had this idea a while ago, but it sort of got stuffed in a drawer. Now that I'm working on other stories again, this one demanded I pay attention to it instead. Why does this always happen? Simultaneous posting with my other site.
"All houses wherein men have lived and died
Are haunted houses. Through the open doors
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,
With feet that make no sound upon the floors.
...
"The stranger at my fireside cannot see
The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear;
He but perceives what is; while unto me
All that has been is visible and clear.
"We have no title-deeds to house or lands;
Owners and occupants of earlier dates
From graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands,
And hold in mortmain still their old estates."
- excerpt from "Haunted Houses" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
PROLOGUE:
The deaths of Adam and Barbara Maitland caught everyone by surprise, including themselves – especially when they woke up afterwards in their partially redecorated house wondering how they got there. So the lack of a last will and testament wasn't much of a shock to anyone. At least, until Jane Butterfield found out that their estate was being auctioned off to pay for the expense of being dead instead of being entrusted to the hands of their closest kin, Jane Butterfield, who was a distant cousin on a convoluted family tree.
Disaster had been an intimate acquaintance of the Maitland family for some time, and this was only the latest in a string of tragedies.
-SCENE BREAK-
For Benjamin Joos, Winter River was supposed to be a new start. He'd spent most of his life wandering from job to job and in and out of jail cells, although they'd never actually been able to pin him down and send him to the big house. A 'handyman' by trade, he thought he'd take the opportunity to see what living on the other side was like when the chance came to snap up the Maitland Hardware store and a big house on a hill in the middle of Nowheresville. They were dead cheap, going for practically nothing, and there had to be a catch.
Well, pun intended: The locals said the house was haunted.
He could deal with that.
-SCENE BREAK-
She had given up on actually haunting a long time ago. Occasionally she would walk wistfully up and down the stairs, trailing long black scarves over the railing for effect. But for the most part she stayed in the guest bedroom working on her morose poetry, which she took the utmost care to keep hidden from the living occupants of the house, whose existence she otherwise hardly took notice of.
That is, until they came back…slightly different.
She watched, and she waited.